[for Rogue]

[dreaming_cowboy]

A space station falls from the sky, and then Faye Valentine falls back into his life. If she can be qualified as being in it now; Spike, frankly, has no idea where to place her in whatever loose mental schema he applies to his life, with no Bebop. They're still stuck in the same place, he supposes, it's just a little bigger, and it's a different

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[un_gloved]

She'd been looking for him with the intention of finding him, which was just about the opposite of what had been true for longer than she probably realized. Didn't make her feel good to realize it, but there it was, and it didn't serve anyone to ignore it.

It wasn't exactly the picture she'd had in her head, once she actually found him, though.

"Do cowboys make good sailors?" she asked as she approached, stopping a few meters from where he stood, behind him, kicking one foot behind the ankle of the other and hitching her thumbs into the belt loops of her cutoffs.

She'd consciously reintroduced herself to the sun and, now that she had a schedule, and even though McCoy wasn't necessarily sure the exertion was good, had started running and doing yoga again. The fact that she could look in the mirror every day and see herself, and be reasonably sure of who that was, meant that the cumulative months of not knowing, and not sleeping, and just curling up in quiet places hoping to stay lucid and in control had become glaringly apparent in

[dreaming_cowboy]

Speaking of people walking back in...

"Sailors, sure," he says, "one ride's as good as another. Builders, that's another thing."

Then he turns around. She looks better, he thinks, than the glimpses he catches of her around, that's he's pretty sure are her, and not a trick of his head, because she hasn't been looking as well as he remembered.

But maybe that's just him putting a new spin on the past. They say that happens; your memories shift, like stories, change in the telling. He's wondered if that's true for him, too, or if his thing with the eye prevents it. Maybe he's the only person who remembers what happened as it actually happened. That'd be enough to skew anyone's view of the world.

[un_gloved]

Her resolve broke. One of her hands went immediately to her hair, raking back through it and pushing it away from her eyes in such a way that when she dropped it, it swung immediately back in a tumble of curls to obscure them. She pushed it instead behind her hear, then shoved the whole hand into her back pocket so it would stop. Then she caught herself chewing her lower lip, stopped that as well, and said, "...Hey."

[dreaming_cowboy]

"Hey," he says back. It seems appropriate. "You know anything about boats?"

He figures she'll work up to whatever brought her out there. And, frankly, he doesn't know what he's dealing with yet. He's pretty sure it's Rogue, which relieves a slight tension inside him somewhere, and she seems less fractured. Least, on the evidence of a couple of seconds.

Maybe she's just hiding it better. Maybe she picked that up from him.